Attention, Please
If there are readers who wish to resume the study of Italian, please respond to this announcement. And, if there is interest in beginning the study of ancient or modern Greek, please also let us know.
Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
I would love to continue with Italian or begin ancient Greek. I simply can’t do it. My work schedule will not allow it. I managed the first ten lessons of Italian but couldn’t study as thoroughly as I needed to. If I get more time I can always start up again on my own but keeping up with the group and doing what will be required of a serious student isn’t possible. I wish it were otherwise.
I would like to continue with Italian and also begin with Greek. For reasons of care giving and other obligations it would be better for me to begin in the new year, as my availability will be increased by then – Deo volante.
The New Year would also be better for me.
I can’t help but ask: if a study of ancient Greek (or for that matter modern Greek) begins, what textbook would be used?
Thanks Dr. Fleming. I’d like to continue Italian. I would love to be able to read classical Greek, but realistically Italian is all I can handle at this time,
I followed along with all of the Italian lessons and enjoyed them, but could not devote the time to serious study. I would gladly continue to follow along for whatever I might be able to pick up. I have studied some Spanish which helps a bit (and hurts, no doubt, somewhat).
My wife and I would be interested in modern Greek in the new year and might devote more effort to this, time allowing. Ancient Greek is very interesting to me but modern Greek would be more useful. We are highly unlikely to travel to Greece, or any other foreign country ever again, as our economic prospects continue to contract, but we have a lot of Greek friends and acquaintances here.
For Ancient Greek, I would use the not quite so ancient “Introduction to Greek” by Crosby and Schaeffer, which was not what I learned Greek from but a good deal better than Chase & Phillips and all the books that have come since. J.T. Allen’s Introduction is perhaps better but rather demanding. Besides, I used C&S for my children. There is a decent republication by Bolchazy-Carducci: https://www.bolchazy.com/An-Introduction-to-Greek-P3348.
We could do C&S at a slow pace of one lesson per week. There are about 76 lessons, so with breaks It would be at least a year and a half instead of the 9 months of a college course.
For Modern Greek, the choices are limited. The older college textbook by Pharmakides takes a knowledge of ancient Greek partly for granted and moves at a dizzying pace. It also has a bad format. Greek Today is easier to follow but is too student-centered for my taste with too many graphics. The book is also very unwieldy and hard to take with you to the dentist. Pimsleur has two levels only, which is pretty basic but useful. Overall the Living Language series with CDs would work the best. The grammar is a bit light but not absent. One caveat. My Modern Greek is for me a very limited skill. I have a pretty good grasp of grammar and a moderate vocabulary. I can make myself understood, but with bad hearing and a slower brain, I have trouble following Greeks. On the other hand, I am tentatively planning two trips to Greece this year, so it is the language I am attempting to revive for myself.
One final note: Don’t be embarrassed or shy about asking questions or begging for mercy, as in “Please slow down for the next two weeks.” I’ll be less active and less demanding, more of a guide than a dictator. Queries keep such a project going.
I’ll continue the Italian at a slower pace and with fewer additions from me. I would expect to see a few questions from students who are working on it. Those who wish to continue should go back and review what they did before and in a month let me know where they are.
I’ll work on getting the relevant materials for modern and ancient Greek and will continue to monitor the Italian lessons, but am unlikely to take an active part in the Italian lessons. Bringing a text to the dentist is no problem as our hygienist is an educated Greek whose mother has written some basic historical work in Greek.
I do find Greek to be the most difficult of all of the European languages to which I have been exposed. In any other group I find that with my native English, some knowledge of various Slavic languages (with some pretension to basic fluency in Polish, at one time), basic Spanish and one year of French, I can understand something. With Greek, I have a hard time even catching the music of the language, much less pick out intelligible words, unless, in church, I have a text before me. I’ll try to at least improve my imperfect knowledge of the alphabet in preparation (so many “i”s and “s”s).
I’m in for Lving Language Italian. I want to finish the first book by the end of January.
I ordered the Crosby and Schaeffer Greek book, but I doubt that I am going to be able to keep up.
I have studied Italian off and on for years, and I keep forgetting what I have learned. Yesterday I relearned the irregular Italian forms of adjectives and adverbs, maybe for 5th time. For me it doesn’t matter where you start the Italian course. Even if I studied it before I’ll probably need a review of it, especially with listening comprehension and idiomatic phrases that would not be translated literally into English.
Will it be confusing to study both ancient and modern Greek at the same time? I imagine that it was quite common for university students in a good school to do so, but despite doing well in school (more an indication of the poor quality of education in this country than my own abilities) I am not a good student. I’m afraid that it will be difficult to keep things separated, possibly leading to embarrassing blunders.
Michael, if one of your primary interests is the Greek liturgy, which is written in an elegant koine Greek derived from Attic/Ionic, you should start with classical Greek. Secondly, I have found nothing but positive in my knowledge of ancient Greek when I learn Modern. I strongly advise you to start with the Ancient, none of which will be wasted.
Example. You go to church and an old Greek lady says, Kale ‘mera. Ancient: Kale hemera. Although the pronunciation has changed, the spelling has not, so reading skills develop quickly.
Years ago I managed 20 units of C&S if memory serves along with some French and a little Coptic. There was no problem with doing that. The problem came with getting a new job which cut my studies short.
I have a copy of Essential Modern Greek Grammar by Douglas Q Adams, which is similar Olga Ragusa’s Italian Grammar and is also published by Dover. So far all the copies of the Living Language course I have found are rather expensive. If you want a course in any language in book and CD format then you may need to get it now since publishers seem to be going to streaming media etc.
A simultaneous study of Classical and Modern Greek would be very interesting. I may at least join the Classical Greek study since I know I’ll regret it if I don’t. If I fail, that will be better than not trying at all. More free time and a more predictable work schedule with far less overtime would help.
I have sporadically and casually studied ( to the point of lightly covering the alphabet, and a bit of nouns and cases/ adjectives and prepositions) Ancient Greek for about five years; I underscore casual to my own displeasure. I learned the little bit I know in about two months and have spent the remaining fifty-eight months re-learning it when I’ve forgotten most of it. Right now I couldn’t teel you eighty percent of that to save my life but may be able to re-learn it in one or two weeks. I have been too cautious to advance in fear that I am insufficient with inflections; and I want to ensure I am on solid ground before doing so. I first learned the alphabet, read the entire Gospel of John aloud, then learned about accents and more about diphthongs, and did that again. I’m guessing that this is NOT recommended. I have both Crosby and Schaeffer and Allen but have not used them yet. My own experience is that the vocabulary is surprisingly intuitive ; those who feel apprehension will probably do better than they think they will.
I have little hope of keeping pace, but would regret it if I didn’t try. C&S is on order.
It sounds like things will not kick off until the new year. Are there any recommendations for preparation? I figure to memorize the alphabet at least.
I took an accelerated Defense Language Institute course in modern Greek, but that was 45 years ago. Any opinions/evaluations of the DLI course?
I believe these were the same as the State Department/Foreign Service Courses, which are excellent for POWs, slaves, et al. Endless repetition with some grammar. I have the Serbo-Croatian course. It’s a great foundation, but as we grow older, some more structured courses will be useful.
I downloaded the FSI courses for Greek and Bulgarian for free this past weekend having discovered them by chance. Thanks for the opinion on their value. They looked OK for free. I’ll get something out of them. C&S is on order.
Incidentally, for the purpose of my “selling” the course to my friends, will the course be available in its entirety at all levels of membership on the Fleming Foundation?
MS: Yes.
For those resuming Italian, please review the first 10 lessons of Italian in LL Essential Italian. Of course you may refer to the ten lessons on this site.
For those beginning or returning to classical Greek, by all means relearn or learn for the first time (if you were never a frat boy) the Greek alphabet. It is not difficult, since most of the letters are like the Latin letters derived from the Greek. As you acquire C&S, please let me know.
For Modern Greek, we shall be using both the Living Language and the very useful Dover paperback by Douglas Adams which someone has recommended. I used to carry it on my travels. I do urge those who are interested in both Ancient and Modern Greek, to consider starting with Ancient. If your interest has something to do with the Greek church, then you are doubtless aware that the liturgy and most important theology is in one or another form of koine, which is not all that different from classical. The biggest changes from ancient/classical/koine and Modern are: pronunciation, the loss of the dative case, simplified endings, and some alien vocabulary. Of course until the communists took over Greece, students had to learn the katharevusa, purified Greek that was much closer to ancient than the ever-crumbling demotic now taught. Professors, priests, writers, journalists would use it in formal discourse, and I am strongly prejudiced in its favor.
A question for Dr. Fleming….
When the Borders Books chain was shuttering its stores years ago I acquired a new copy of The Basics of Biblical Greek; it is a Zondervan publication edited by Mounce. Sadly, it has occupied a spot on my shelf like an obscure museum piece since then. In all shameful candor, I had forgotten that I even had it until this discussion! Any familiarity with this edition and / or any recommendations?
Is there a distinction to be made between “ancient” and “classical” Greek?
Having discussed it with my 4 oldest kids, they’ve decided they want to try for the Ancient Greek. So I’m ordering the C & S. They don’t believe they’ll be able to do both the Greek and continue Italian while also doing Latin for their homeschool lessons, so they’re dropping, for now, the Italian. I would say that I would try to keep going with the Italian myself, but I find my appetite for self delusion lessening somewhat as I age. I just don’t think I’ll honestly be able to keep up even at a relaxed pace. I will continue to listen to the CDs, though – so perhaps my brain will absorb something through osmosis.
Some answers:
Ancient Greek is generic rather elastic term that principally includes, 1) The epic dialect of Homer–a compendium of dialects but mostly Ionic, 2) The Ionic Greek of the early poets and philosophers, 3) The Attic-Ionic subdialect used in Athens, 3) the Aeolic Greek of Sappho and Alcaeus, 3) the Dorian dialects of Corinth, Argos, Sparta etc and the literary dialect derived from it found in Alcman, Pindar, and rather imperfectly in the choruses of Greek tragedy, 4) the koine (common) dialect that begins to develop as Attic-Ionic merges with Ionic in the Hellenistic world. This dialect is often subjected to heavily archaic/Attic influences in high-falutin writers, but is found in a simple and not terribly grammatical form in the NT and worst of all in Revelations, a book I can make no sense of in Greek or English.
Traditionally, Greek was taught in English and American schools starting with Attic prose writers like Lysias, Xenophon, and Demosthenes, then dramatic poets like Euripides and Sophocles. After a year or two of Attic, one went on to Homer,, then perhaps Herodotus. The standard, fairly or unfairly, was Attic, though once one has got a good hold of Attic, the dialect of Herodotus is pretty easy–one simply learns to replace -tt- with -ss- and not to contract stem vowels in verbs. Interestingly Modern Greek still has the second person singular passive ending of present tense in -sai, which is Ionic not Attic.
There is really no such thing as “biblical Greek.” It is like saying you are going to study New York Times English. Mounce is pretty standard in seminaries, but what I know of it confirms my impression that the American clergy, even those claim to have several years of Greek, do not really know the language at all. I once had a student in second year Greek, a Presbyterian clergyman in his 40s, who had had several years in seminary and claimed to have been reading the NT in Greek. It is a good thing he was not taking my class for credit because he would have failed. I still remember the shock I experienced when he could not recognize a subjunctive verb form. “Didn’t they teach you the subjunctive?” I asked. “”Yes, they taught us to recognize subjunctive forms.” Good grief.
One quotation from Mounce I have come across says it all. He explains that the Almighty chose koine Greek because everyone would understand it. If he were around, I’d sell him a rabbit’s foot. Nietzsche, a trained classicist, once wondered aloud why the Creator, when he decided to give mankind his ultimate revelation, chose to learn Greek–and why did he learn it so badly? The nice thing about only learning only biblical Greek is that you will never be able to read the Fathers who write much better Greek.
Vince, your kids have made the right decision. We’ll be taking the Italian at a slow pace.
Those who want to study Greek should inform me if they have studied Latin or at least an inflected language like Russian. Greek, Latin, and Serbo-Croatian share certain features, such as the declension of nouns. Greek has 4 and 1/2 cases. Latin 5 1/2, S-C, depending on how you count perhaps 6. Greek has four moods of the verb: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and optative, and to some extent three voices: Active, Passive, and Middle. Latin has three moods, two voices, Slavic languages only two moods, indicative and imperative, and like English only one true voice, active, since the passives are periphrastic (compound forms). My wife tells me that at her college, when an art major was forced to take Latin, she went running through the halls of her dorm shrieking, “What is a case??!!”
One other problem with seminary Greek is that the texts rarely require much writing in Greek. The same is true of Wheelock’s Latin–which was originally designed for self-study, so it is not fair to blame the author.
My degree, for the very little that it is worth, is in Russian. I also formally studied Polish and Spanish (if this is relevant).
I self-studied Wheelock and am currently hacking through Gallic War — slow but steady.
(C&S is in hand)
Russian helps a little, and so does Polish, for understanding verbal aspect in Greek, ancient and modern, also for the whole question of inflecting nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs. On verbal aspect, which dominates Slavic verbal systems, it is dominant in Greek moods other than the indicative, but even in the indicative, it is the basic difference between the imperfect tense and the aorist (simple past). Greek is clearer than Latin whose Aorist does double duty as a present perfect. Aspect, of course, refers to the point of view of the speaker or writer, whether he is conceiving of an action that is complete, perfect, as opposed to incomplete by being continuous, repeated, habitual, etc. In English we have periphrastic work arounds, such as “I was going to work, when I saw something.” Imperfective….aorist.
But though we have work arounds to express the same thought-thus making translation possible–aspect is not fundamental to the way we think. Thus we can say. For three years, I went to school every day. Slavic speakers speaking English will say things like, “I won’t be doing that any more.”
I remember my Greek housemate, Miltiades Polyzos (known to Americans as Mel Polison), saying to one of my fellow graduates named Nick, who had lived in Greece: “Nikos, when you going done been graduate?” Nick, without missing a beat, replied, “Mel, I’m going done been graduate this year.” After trying to speak Greek or Serbian for a few weeks, my brain starts insisting on aspect. Fortunately in Greek, as opposed to Slavic tongues, it is a question of tense forms and not parallel sets of verbs. It is much easier. It does drive elementary students a bit mad. They are forever wondering why an aorist subjunctive can be used to refer to a single event in the present.
Clear as mud so far, but my wife is helping me to understand that I do understand the concepts, although the linguistic vocabulary has atrophied to insignificance. I’ll get it.
‘“I won’t be doing that any more,”’ has been my mantra exactly in relation to school for decades, but for ancient Greek with the master I’m going to have to gird the old loins once again and enter the breach. Yoi!
Too many foreign languages too early in late may sometimes damage one’s grasp of his native tongue, but the opposite is generally true for people who learn a few languages. One obvious example is word order. The standard English order is subject preceded by modifiers verb object or complement: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Position of words is a primary means of noting their function, but in a highly inflected language with noun cases, the order matters much less. Latin word order is perhaps frequently subject, preceded or followed by modifiers, object, verb, Thus the fox, quick and brown over dog lazy jumps, but if, for example the hidden question is “over what does the fox jump?” then the Latin might read, “The dog lazy jumps over the quick fox brown.” Greek is even more fluid than Latin. After confronting these differences one begins to have a greater sensitivity to word order in English and the emphasis of a simple transition as in, “Gone are the days, when my heart was young and gay” becomes obvious.
Thanks much for your insightful answers on the Ancient/Biblical Greek distinctions, Dr. Fleming. I now have the Adams Dover edition (on Kindle) and the C and S is ordered and is promised to arrive by Christmas.
I have the Fleming Latin course on CDs and have studied Russian many years ago in grad school at Pitt. No formal study of Croatian, but have done self-study and absorbed as much as possible from the maternal side of my family. (I integrate Croatian into my daily rosaries, too). Not sure the other languages that I know or have studied apply directly here.
I have studied Latin.
Anyone who wishes to start on the alphabet etc, might look at this:
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=112596
Today I received the Crosby and Schaeffer Introduction to Greek.
I finally received my copy of Crosby and Schaeffer a couple of days ago. Must have been put on a slow boat.